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Orange Lives Matter, Too!
By continuing to read this article beyond this sentence I agree to do so only if I have made a personal commitment to read it in it’s entirety, regardless of how any statement that has not had a chance to have been fully articulated makes me feel. I also agree to reserve judgement until I have finished reading the whole article.
Note: To clarify, the title of this article does not apply to anyone who is in prison for committing a real crime, like sex offenses, domestic violence, murder, burglary, etc.
After watching a full morning’s worth of cable news coverage of the recent attacks on Dallas, Texas police officers while citizens were protesting the murder of 2 black men by police, I decided to write this. I was repeatedly bombarded by an artificial, politically correct sense of sympathy for the officers who died — for if you have any conscientious objections to law enforcement, you cannot be a patriot!
I was incessantly being reminded that these officers do not get to go home to their families, but I am admittedly resistant to feeling sympathy for them simply because they are paid to spend their entire work life taking innocent people away from their families, jobs, everything, and putting them in the world’s biggest prison system (thanks to the extremely helpful & rehabilitative War on Drugs), one that is at least partially privatized — meaning these company’s stock value is directly dependent on a stable flow of new prisoners!
What makes this even more appalling is that most of the people who use drugs are only doing so to self-medicate some form of trauma, depression, anxiety, and PTSD. We are taking people who were victimized, mainly as children, and throwing them in prison cells. Before you think “our government says most of these drugs have no medicinal value!”, consider the VA prescribes opiates for PTSD.
Furthermore, heroin is metabolized into morphine within 8 seconds of entering the body, do not try to make some distinction to rationalize the imaginary line in the sand drawn between heroin and pharmaceutical opiates; if anything you should be upset that people are forced to use something that is unregulated and may contain other pollutants added in by the manufacturers.
Side note: have you ever wondered why opium production in Afghanistan went up by more than 800% during our recent ~decade-long occupation? They use to televise our military in Humvee’s armed with mounted machine guns guarding the opium poppy fields, so what’s really going on?
As I continued switching between the coverage by the main cable news networks, I became increasingly irritated, even infuriated at times. This is because I have come to believe, with every fiber in my being, that no police officer since President Nixon left office can possibly be regarded as “innocent”; all things included, there are only degrees of harmfulness to the community in which they work.
As hard as it may be for some of you to read that, I would never say such things lightly. I came to this conclusion after about 15~ years of life experiences, thought, research, etc. As a victim of the drug war myself, I take the issue of police misconduct & criminal justice reform very seriously.
Before that voice in your head attempts to convince you that I must not be an honest source of information simply because I have been directly effected by this, you should know that I adopted & internalized the general accepted scientific standards for research, data, hypothesis, etc., since I was 13 years old, and I do not let my opinions cloud my judgement or perspectives. at 13, I made a commitment to myself to not become one of those people who creates a false reality based on misinformation or preference — that is, even if I were to end up in a suicidal depression over some impassable revelation, would I make any effort to undo anything I have learned.
“I truly feel that you cannot be a responsible adult citizen & participant of your environment if you are not living in truth, whether that environment is your society, workplace, home, on a bus, or a voting booth.” — Ryan Perkins
You must realize that the overwhelming majority of people cops have been incarcerating since ~1980 have been so for non-violent drug possession. Since we began the “War on Drugs” our prison population has increased by at least 500% last I checked, so it’s pretty safe to assume that nearly 80% of the prison population are doing time for mere possession of something that just happens to have been deemed illegal at present (remember prohibition, and what about before the Drug War?).
You must also realize that their effectiveness is measured by a primitive interpretation of stats, wherein the value they are awarded from each arrest is not based on the quality or type of crime that was committed, but simply by the volume — outside of very broad categories, such as felonies > misdemeanors; yet child rape is somehow weighted the same as drug possession, just because both are felonies. This is one reason why police officers look upon drug users as prey, because they are used to benefit or justify their careers & salaries. I hope you can you understand why firsthand targets of the Drug War despise police after they have witnessed them proudly displaying a shit-eating, ear-to-ear grin on their face when they “score” an arrest on these people who did nothing morally wrong? It is sickening, really.
What I have been leading up to is this: despite what we have been led to believe, drug use itself is not immoral in any way. Just as you probably believe you have the right to drink alcohol when you come home from work or when you’re stressed out, every human reserves the right to change their state of mind — especially if it helps them in any meaningful way — period! How well I know that most of you reading this are having an internal dialogue attempting to rationalize this injustice as logical; feel free to waste all the time you want trying to convince yourself that it is.
Once you factor in that the large majority of people being incarcerated are done so for non-violent drug offenses, you will be forced to conclude that police are effectively sworn to actively participate in the destruction of innocent lives, families, and freedom of self-medicating drug users.
In conclusion, I want you to fully understand that I do give police officers credit for enforcing the laws that punish those who are actually victimizing people, such as domestic violence, rape, child molestation, assault, murder, etc.
Note: Before you begin the internal dialogue about the argument that drug use (isolated, use itself) is a victimful crime, realize that to believe that you must also think anyone who drinks alcohol, whether in the presence of their children or not, are pieces of shit. You would have to believe the act itself (not what may or may not happen after), harmful or not, is morally wrong & destructive. In the case of alcohol, it is often the case that it causes parents to become a destructive force to their children — in part because it is the only drug which has been scientifically linked to domestic violence, which makes it an ideal choice for any parent. Most drug addicts pity alcoholics because it is so stupefying & disruptive to normal behavior, like walking and talking, for example. In contrast, opiates, for example, make you happy; not stupid & violent, incoherent.
It is the enforcement of the laws that were created to facilitate the War on Drugs that makes me feel they do more harm than good, especially when you consider that it is these arrests that makeup 65-80%. We need to take all the people that work for Drug Enforcement Agency and create something that is actually necessary, like a Sex Offender Enforcement agency. Because this would result in lower rates sex offender victims, it is safe to assume that the drug use & addiction of these kids will be lower as well.
On this day I mourn the loss of the two innocent black men who were murdered by a couple bad police, and all of those who are doing time or scarred by the title of “felon” as a result of the Drug War, which is perhaps the most inaccurately justified and misguided of any “war” in history.
If you think I am a horrible person after reading this, or have been made irrevocably mad; don’t worry. Be grateful you have the freedom to drink a beer to calm yourself, even it is likely that you will become argumentative & confrontational, a killing machine behind the wheel, mentally handicapped for the duration, and end up beating up your wife and children as a result. It is obviously the ideal choice of psychoactive to have been legalized & you would be well within your rights to look down upon anyone who does not have the same taste in psychoactive substances as you, and your morality is superior in all it’s self-righteousness.
If this is you, I leave you with this: